Work Text:
The call that Mori least expects to get at two a.m. on a Tuesday night is from Dazai.
The call Dazai least expects to make at two a.m., stumbling drunk into his apartment on a random Tuesday night - average, for his case - is to Mori.
“Hello? Who’s this?”
Dazai takes a moment to register that he’s calling from an unknown number. Burner phones and all that. Sketchy things he does.
He unsteadily walks over to his bed. “Mori!”
The voice pitches high with confusion, betrayed before Mori has the chance to cover it up. “Dazai?”
He laughs a little. Truly shocking Mori never gets old, especially as he’s one of the few people who can actually do it, and did it generously in the Port Mafia.
“Yep, it’s me! Miss me?”
He’s not thinking that clearly. His room is blurring and he hasn’t even turned on the lights- oh, no. It’s not blurring at all, actually. He’s just staring into blackness, somehow having found his bed by the light of his phone and the dim moonlight shining through the window.
The other end of the phone is silent for a long time.
Finally, Mori seems to settle on a response - ignoring Dazai’s nonsense. It’s an average response. “Why are you calling me?”
“Ooh~” Dazai starts to tick off on his fingers. “D’you mean at this time of night, on a random Tuesday, or calling you at all?”
“All three.” There’s a pause. “Dazai, are you drunk?”
“Fortunately for you!” His voice is loud, cheerful, his head spinning and thoughts moving simultaneously too-fast and slowly. “Though I wouldn’t say it’s any easier to manipulate me.”
“I wouldn’t-“
“Don’t lie, Mori.” There- a hint of sober Dazai, in the lethal drop of his voice and knife-sharp response.
Silence. Dazai decides he doesn’t want to be on the bed and slides into the chair at the small table in his room. There’s just enough space for him to put his elbows up and slip downwards, burying his chin in the space, without moving the empty bottles littering the surface.
“You should hang up,” Mori finally says. His mask is back on, and Dazai, drunken as he is, pounces on the crack in the armor. The requirement for a mask means he’s getting to him.
“ You,” he fires back, blinking at the light faintly illuminating the edge of a bottle, “are.” He stops. Thinks about it, about the sudden twisting of his stomach and the poison in it and the poison in his head- “You are so much.”
It’s nearly a hiss. Dazai goes very still where he sits, dark gaze fixed on the line of light along the glass edge.
“…To you?” Mori sounds as if he’s treading very carefully.
“You…” Dazai hits the speaker button and drops the phone on the table with a thud. He picks up an empty bottle and starts tapping it against the wood, staring at the shifting light on the glass, stringing words together that swirl dizzyingly with alcohol and darkness. “Odasaku,” he finishes, in a low hiss.
The bottle thuds. “Why did you keep me alive?” Thud. “I would’ve been a perfect witness if I’d died. Everything… it all would’ve been fine if I died. Everything. All of it. I should die now.”
He doesn’t give Mori a chance to answer before continuing. “But I lived. You kept me alive. You promised me death and then kept me alive and- you’re a hypocrite, Mori.”
“It was all I could do.”
Dazai laughs, sharp and incredulous, matched with a thudding of the glass’s edge on the table. “ Not what I wanted. Not what I fucking wanted. Never. Everyone- everyone wants to keep me alive, and-“
His head slips down, the bottle stilling loosely held in one hand as he buries his face in his arms fully. “I don’t want to be here,” he mumbles. He’s only half sure Mori’s actually heard him. He doesn’t care.
“ Dazai, you know I-“
He abruptly lifts his head to glare at the glowing phone screen, venom on his tongue, a moment of harsh, knife-edge clarity, “If you say something about you having to make sacrifices for the greater good, I am going to throw this phone at the wall ,” he snaps, cold, edged with the ice of blue eyes and red hair and whiskey-
Mori is silent. Dazai drops his face back into his arms.
The moonlight glints off of the edge of the liquor bottle, a silver line spraying out amber shards, the soft screen’s glow lighting it a faded blue. Dazai tips the bottle back and forth on the axis of the bottom edge, watching how the light swings back and forth with it. He sits in silence with Mori for a few long moments.
“Fuck your sacrifices,” he eventually mumbles. “I don’t give a shit about the greater good.” His voice is a low hiss, poison coursing through his veins and his mind, both literal and metaphorical. “They can all burn, if only-“
If only he comes back. Dazai doesn’t finish the sentence.
Mori allows him a moment of silence, and then- “That doesn’t sound like Agency talk.”
It’s judgmental, hint of teasing, hint of a sort of solemn sympathy. A tone Mori’s specifically designed for Dazai, it seems, as that little tinge of honest sympathy doesn’t appear anywhere else.
Most of the time it infuriates him. This is most of the time.
“ Fuck them too, ” Dazai hisses back, except not really, except really because it’s only because of Oda that he-
It’s complicated. Too much for his drunken mind to go through. Definitely too much for his poisoned drunken mind to go through without saying several things he’ll regret in the morning.
Absolutely too much to do all that to Mori.
His shoulders slump as he abandons the train of thought. “Why did I call you?” He’s back to a dejected mumble, the fire and anger whisked out with the cool breeze through his window. It’s half a rhetorical question and half genuine.
“I don’t know.” Mori actually sounds honest. Dazai wants to laugh, but he doesn’t. “It would be better for both of us if you hung up right now.”
“Maybe.” He tilts the bottle lazily back and forth some more. “Though now I just… wanna not do what you say.”
It’s petulant, a bit childish, a bit teasing while still slightly guarded. A tone Dazai has specifically designed for Mori, as that truly childish whine to his voice doesn’t appear anywhere else except with one other man. And it hasn’t appeared at all since Dazai was eighteen years old.
His brows furrow with a sudden realization through the fog of his mind. “Why don’t you hang up? You have a phone too.”
The last sentence is unnecessary. He says it anyway.
“You called me,” Mori answers, which isn’t an answer.
“You can still,” the bottle tilts, “hang up.”
“…Would you say goodbye to me?”
“Hm. No.” His voice is flat, plain. “I might just actually hang up on you now.”
“Then it would be bad etiquette to hang up on you without receiving a reply back, wouldn’t it?”
Dazai is abruptly glaring at the bottle “Nevermind. I will hang up on you now, Mori. Have a-“
He stops. It feels… bad. He’s drunk, so drunk he’ll be throwing it all up soon and then passing out and calling out of work in the morning. He called Mori as his one drunken call a week, of all people.
He’s in a weird space. The insult that leaps to his tongue, pitched high and mocking, tastes bitter. It tastes like the poison in his mind, foggy and unclear, corroding his thoughts and logic.
Mori says nothing in the several ensuing moments of silence. Dazai blinks, and suddenly he realizes he’d been dissociated as the bottle’s amber light comes back into focus.
He looks down at the phone screen. He has nothing more to say and he’d rather just like to throw up, pass out, and wake up without all of these twisting thoughts of morality and friendship and happiness-
The low hum of the phone cuts out as he hangs up, leaving Dazai in silence. He stares ahead of him, at the multiple bottles in front of him.
It occurs to him, in the quiet, that Mori might have gotten exactly what he wanted by making Dazai hang up.
He buries his face fully in his arms and curses him in three languages.